


the diligent and the penitent alike

by akitania (spacehairdresser)



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Established TenFour, Other, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-07 01:06:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15897777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehairdresser/pseuds/akitania
Summary: “He was— it pains me to say this, Tender, but he was right,” said Fourteen. “Itisthe most terrible thing he’s ever built.”





	the diligent and the penitent alike

Winchester was the one to greet them at the Altar spaceport, her face turning theatrically grim when they caught sight of her. “Oh shit,” she deadpanned. “It’s the cops.”

“ _So_ ungrateful,” Tender said, ruffling her hair. “Winchester, you remember Fourteen?”

They were a few steps behind, preoccupied — checking messages, Tender knew by now; there was a pattern to the way their eyes flickered under the visor. Rude as well. She thwacked their shoulder, which did less to catch their attention than it once did.

“’Course I do!” Winchester said, maybe a little offended. “Sho told me what you look like now,” she added to Fourteen, who had managed to click back to presence. “It’s really cool!”

 “Sorry,” they said mostly to Tender, and no designer had assumed a Hegemon’s bodyguard would need the ability to smile wanly, so they did not, but she understood what that particular flat affect meant as well as she knew the patterns of their eyes’ lights. “It’s good to see you again, Winchester.”

The girl smiled shyly, suddenly a bit awkward with Carcanet's Ironclad towering over her. “Sho’s waiting in a craft outside,” she said. “Let’s not keep her waiting?” She reached questioningly for Tender’s bag.

“I’ve got it,” said Tender, with a backward glance to Fourteen. “You can read your mail on the ride.”

 

“He was— it pains me to say this, Tender, but he was right,” said Fourteen. “It  _is_ the most terrible thing he’s ever built.”

The thing was. The thing was that Arbit was enormous, and she’d expected it to be, but she’d also expected it to be _contained_ in some way. It had been pitched as a temple. Not this wide stretch of dust (missing its blue detailing) and then that on the horizon… moving. The thing was also that Grand had showed her and Fourteen the design that night in the Steady, but Tender hadn’t understood then that a perfect simulation could still only ever be a simulation. It was behavior glossed by an algorithm, the same way you couldn’t help applying logic in recounting a dream because delirium resisted language. A model, after all, was nothing _but_ prediction. In person, even from a distance, Arbit was in its entirety the parts of dreams that fell between words.

“I hate it,” she said. “So much.”

Sho glanced back to the passenger seats, pursing her lips. “It’s very distracting.”

“Good thing I’m driving,” Winchester joked, and Sho smiled at her, tired but amused.

“For the students, I mean,” she said, more to Tender and Fourteen than to the younger girl. “They keep taking day trips to see this machine being built in the middle of nowhere and not coming back for weeks. Not that I begrudge them; I’d like to understand it too, and it’s obvious there’s so much to learn from it.”

Fourteen drummed their broad fingers on their thigh, a sound so disproportionately loud even over the craft’s engine that Sho winced. “But it is very much the opposite of selling vacation packages.”

It was hard to tell if Fourteen was agitated. Well, agitated specifically by the reason they’d come, or that they’d come at all. She touched their hand; their fingers were not made for twining, but she’d become accustomed to pressing hers against their cold approximation of a palm.

“We have actually been getting more visitors,” said Sho, her eyes only resting on their hands for a moment. “The kind of people who make a pilgrimage to the first Divine of a new generation are generally the same people who would like to see the Temple of the Lost, even if they think the mission of one or the other is…”

“Bullshit,” Winchester supplied.

Sho, unlike some people, very much had the ability to smile wanly. “Yes.”

“Do you remember, he told us this was a Divine that didn’t need an Excerpt. For that matter, he told us it wasn’t actually a Divine. Why are we here?”

“You’re my plus-one,” Tender said, skirting the question, then doubled back to it. “Branding.”

There was a minuscule darkening of Sho’s expression, something Tender noticed and then noticed Anticipation noticing in the same heartbeat. The same tug of a thread. “That isn’t exactly the word I’d use.”

“Of course.”

“I’m _glad_ you’re here, Tenderness,” Sho said, suddenly forceful, still hitting the final syllable with just a hint too much emphasis. “You too, of course, Fourteen— I just mean that it’s important, with so many eyes on Arbit, that we let them see that there’s continuity even now.”

Fourteen’s hand was heavy on hers, but then, they couldn’t help it. She circled her thumb on a bulbous knuckle. “I never had the proper ritual myself, so I’m glad to have the opportunity to carry it out for someone else.”

For a moment, Sho’s shoulders sagged, her eyes dropping. “I wish Signet were here.” Then she blinked, her mouth rounding into an O. “Not instead of you! I’m sure you’ll do just as good a job.”

“No, I understand,” said Tender. “I miss her too.” It ached, an ache complicated by the imperfect Signet that had been living in her head for, what, two years now? There with all the thread. If she were around, she’d likely be the one in the back seat of Sho’s little speeder, and it was just slightly funny to picture her staring up at Arbit’s awful motion. _Signet, I’ve gone to Altar to make Grand Magnificent an Excerpt,_ she thought hard, in case she could hear and needed a laugh. _Give me strength_.

 

Closer, to Tender and Fourteen’s relief, Arbit was revealed to be silent. A sonic component, Grand had explained before the ceremony, _could_ improve its capacity for disruption, but at what cost? He had to _live_ there.

_No, you don’t_ , Fourteen had said, and Grand scoffed. Fourteen scoffed back, and Tender suggested they begin the ritual so they wouldn’t be there all day.

They both made their escape outside soon after it was over, although Fourteen expressed some apprehension about the sand. “I’ll clean you out myself if I need to, you baby,” Tender said. “I spent a month _camping_ here.”

“You’re organic,” they grumbled.

She laughed softly in assent, settling by their feet atop a blue blanket she made for herself. They often neglected to sit, to lie down, so she didn’t bother telling them to make themselves comfortable. The concept wasn’t the same for them anymore. She rested her back against their shin, watching Volition set and the hole in the Mirage stay at stubborn rest. Next to that, what could possibly be so alien about Arbit? It made her mind hurt to look at, but it was one strange machine in the thousands the Crystal Palace had seen. And steamrolled.

“If it doesn’t do anything else, at least it’s keeping him busy,” said Fourteen, evidently on the same page. _It’s important to have a hobby_ , some version of Signet chimed in. Tender chuckled, feeling the sound resonate back through Fourteen and through her again. There was comfort in the uncertainty of Signet’s presence; they are so thoroughly no longer the Beloved Dust, but its memory can't leave them alone.

“You ditched the party,” a wounded voice came from behind them. “You’re the guests of honor.” Grand glanced between the two of them and amended, “Tender’s the guest of honor. Fourteen’s just here.”

“I am,” Fourteen agreed.

Grand balanced three flutes of gelatinous fluid in his glittering hands — of course he’d left his fingers on, to drag trails of light wherever he moved. “This one’s synthetic,” he said, passing it to Fourteen with the necessary verve to force them to take it, and another to Tender. “This one’s not, unfortunately. Gig sent me a case for my birthday. Speaking of my birthday, did you install the update on your Independence Mark II?”

“I did not,” said Tender. “It’s nice that you and Gig are getting along again.”

“We aren’t,” said Grand. “Is that—”

He was looking at the blanket. “It is,” she said. “Come, sit down.”

His brow furrowed. “I don’t feel like it would be— Not that I’m passing judgement on your relationship with _your_ Divine, I guess you know her pretty well since I think she lives in your brain or something when she’s not being string, but I don’t know if it would be appropriate for _me_. To sit on her.”

“Okay, well,” said Tender. “When you put it like that.”

So he stood awkwardly beside Fourteen, dwarfed by them, while Tender sipped the benighted juice and dwelt on the sense that she was the only person who knew the first thing about making herself comfortable.

“You didn’t need to do this,” Fourteen said.

Tender looked up. Through the hole in the sky, the stars spun.

“Oh,” said Grand, quite mildly. “It’s interesting _you’d_ say that. You know when Waltz Tango (Cache) told me to stick to the things I’m good at? Actually, I don’t remember if you were there for that conversation, but it was a thing he said to me and also maybe you.”

“It sounds like something he’d say,” Tender said, a little distracted. “He’s won awards for his career counseling, you know.”

“Yeah,” said Grand. “He’s really incredible. And what I’m good at is making a name for myself — literally, I mean, picking my name, I did a great job the first time — and holding drinks. So I made sure everyone who cared a little about the project got to see it legitimized, because last I checked people didn’t _love_ that other Divine who wouldn’t take an Excerpt. And I was one, I was an Excerpt way before tonight. I built Arbit until it started building itself, and now that’s—” Tender glanced back to see him gesture helplessly, spinning golden lines. Grand Magnificent was very tired. She'd seen it when she'd said the words for him, in front of everyone who'd come to see the machine that could outsmart the Rapid Evening and the man who had built it.

It was fair. Divines were tiring company.

“You could leave,” said Fourteen.

“Not really.”

“Not really,” Anticipation confirmed in Tender’s voice. The Signet in there too was smiling, and she smiled back, though in physical space that was at Grand. Limitations.

“Ugh,” he said. “Creepy.” He looked at Fourteen, who was watching Arbit, so he looked there too. "You kept going on about how dangerous this could be. You want me to just abandon it? It could _explode_."

Fourteen couldn't sigh, but a vent shuttered. "There are a lot of people who could be here. In fact, there are a lot of people here, and it really makes me wonder why you think _you're_ the essential cog in this."

"I'm astoundingly brilliant," said Grand. "Next question. Does it bother you that I need to keep working to sleep at night?"

"You're not," said Fourteen. "Sleeping at night."

He shrugged.

Tender drained the glass, for better or worse. “Well, I’m the god of a hopelessly timefucked domain, so there are places you can be even if you can’t ever get away from the Divine you built for the express purpose of finding peace for yourself. I’ll make a roller disco whenever you want. Doesn’t cost me anything.”

“You’ve never made a roller disco when I actually wanted one,” Grand said, briefly petulant. “But… this is peaceful. Apart from the worst Divine that’s ever existed. This place, the outskirts of Séance, it reminds me of Old Church — you’ve never been, but it was this town on the old Quire where we stayed for a while before I ended up building a Divine for the despot of an artist’s colony. So I’ve really come full circle.”

Tender interpreted Fourteen’s silence as telling.

“Wait, do you think that means I can get Saints? I kind of hate all the ones I’ve ever met and Morning's Observation killed the one who seemed okay, but as a concept—”

“Grand,” said Fourteen suddenly, “Do you want to dance?”

He had the gall to nearly blush. “Only if you actually want to. You can just threaten me, now. While you’re standing there.”

“That’s not— and I wasn’t threatening you before, either, were you even _listening_ —”

“I _do_ feel like dancing, now that you mention it, Fourteen,” Tender said loudly. “And I can play better music at the Steady than what you’ve got in there.”

Grand pointed his jelly flute at her with an accusatory air. “First of all, that band is composed of honorable traitors from the Advent Group. Second, are you telling me to leave my own party?”

Tender stood up, let her divine picnic blanket soak back into her hands. “Yes. That’s what I’m doing.”

“Good,” he said. “Great. Let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! say hey on [tumblr!](http://akitania.tumblr.com)


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